House of Habsburg | European dynasty | Britannica.com House of Habsburg Alternative Titles: Habsburgs, House of Austria, House of Hapsburg Related Topics House of Habsburg, also spelled Hapsburg, also called House of Austria, royal German family , one of the principal sovereign dynasties of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century. Origins The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg, or Habichtsburg (“Hawk’s Castle”), built in 1020 by Werner, bishop of Strasbourg, and his brother-in-law, Count Radbot, in the Aargau overlooking the Aar River , in what is now Switzerland. Radbot’s grandfather, Guntram the Rich, the earliest traceable ancestor of the house, may perhaps be identified with a Count Guntram who rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950. Radbot’s son Werner I (died 1096) bore the title count of Habsburg and was the grandfather of Albert III (died c. 1200), who was count of Zürich and landgrave of Upper Alsace.

Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232) acquired Laufenburg and the “Waldstätte” (Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden, and Lucerne), but on his death his sons Albert IV and Rudolf III partitioned the inheritance. Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408. Austria and the rise of the Habsburgs in Germany Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I ) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins (see Austria: Accession of the Habsburg ).

The family’s custom, however, was to vest the government of its hereditary domains not in individuals but in all male members of the family in common, and, though Rudolf II renounced his share in 1283, difficulties arose again when King Albert I died (1308). After a system of condominium had been tried, Rudolf IV of Austria in 1364 made a compact with his younger brothers that acknowledged the principle of equal rights but secured de facto supremacy for the head of the house. Even so, after his death the brothers Albert III and Leopold III of Austria agreed on a partition (Treaty of Neuberg, 1379): Albert took Austria, Leopold took Styria, Carinthia, and Tirol. Similar Topics Fugger family King Albert I’s son Rudolf III of Austria had been king of Bohemia from 1306 to 1307, and his brother Frederick I had been German king as Frederick III (in rivalry or conjointly with Louis IV the Bavarian) from 1314 to 1330.

Albert V of Austria was in 1438 elected king of Hungary , German king (as Albert II ), and king of Bohemia; his only surviving son, Ladislas Posthumus , was also king of Hungary from 1446 (assuming power in 1452) and of Bohemia from 1453. With Ladislas the male descendants of Albert III of Austria died out in 1457. Meanwhile the Styrian line descended from Leopold III had been subdivided into Inner Austrian and Tirolean branches. Exploring Europe: Fact or Fiction? For the greater part of Frederick’s reign it was scarcely foreseeable that his descendants would monopolize the imperial succession so long as they did.

The Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms were lost to the Habsburgs for nearly 70 years from the death of Ladislas Posthumus in 1457; the Swiss territories, lost in reality from 1315 onward (see Switzerland: Expansion and Position of Power ), were finally renounced in 1474; and Frederick’s control over the Austrian inheritance itself was long precarious, not only because of aggression from Hungary but also because of dissension between him and his Habsburg kinsmen. Yet Frederick, one of whose earliest acts in his capacity as emperor had been to ratify, in 1453, the Habsburgs’ use of the unique title of “archduke of Austria” (first arrogated for them by Rudolf IV in 1358–59), may have had some prescient aspiration toward worldwide empire for the House of Austria: the motto A.E.I.O.U., which he occasionally used, is generally interpreted as meaning Austriae est imperare orbi universo (“Austria is destined to rule the world”), or Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan (“The whole world is subject to Austria”).

He lived long enough to see his son Maximilian make the most momentous marriage in European history; and three years before his death he also saw the Austrian hereditary lands reunited when Sigismund of Tirol abdicated in Maximilian’s favour (1490). Britannica Stories Scientists Ponder Menopause in Killer Whales Before explaining what the Habsburgs owed dynastically to Maximilian, mention can be made of a physical peculiarity characteristic of the House of Habsburg from the emperor Frederick III onward: his jaw and his lower lip were prominent, a feature supposed to have been inherited by him from his mother, the Mazovian princess Cymbarka. Later intermarriage reproduced the “Habsburg lip” more and more markedly, especially among the last Habsburg kings of Spain . The world power of the Habsburgs Even before Frederick III’s time the House of Habsburg had won much of its standing in Germany and in central Europe through marriages to heiresses. Frederick’s son Maximilian carried that matrimonial policy to heights of unequalled brilliance.

First he himself in 1477 married the heiress of Burgundy , Charles the Bold’s daughter Mary , with the result that the House of Habsburg, in the person of their son Philip , inherited the greater part of Charles the Bold’s widespread dominions: not the duchy of Burgundy itself, which the French seized, but Artois, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the County of Burgundy or Franche Comté. Secondly, though he failed after Mary’s death in 1482 to secure Brittany also by a similar coup ( France frustrated his proxy marriage to the Breton heiress Anne), he procured Philip’s marriage, in 1496, to Joan , prospective heiress of Castile and Aragon: thus securing for his family not only Spain , with Naples–Sicily and Sardinia, but also the immense dominions the Spaniards were about to conquer in America. Maximilian’s matrimonial achievements were the occasion of the famous hexameter Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”).

Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Since Philip I of Castile died prematurely, his son was already ruler of the Burgundian heritage and of Spain when, in 1519, he succeeded Maximilian as ruler of the Habsburgs’ Austrian territories. In the same year, he was elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V . The threat of force as well as an enormous expenditure in bribes was necessary to secure Charles’s election. Besides the fact that many of the German princes were reluctant to saddle themselves with so mighty a sovereign, there was the opposition of France, which saw itself already half-encircled, from the northeast clockwise to the southwest, by Charles’s possessions. Dating from Maximilian’s Burgundian marriage, antagonism between the French kings and the Habsburgs was to persist, to the progressive detriment of the latter, until the middle of the 18th century, and until the second half of the 17th the other European powers would mostly sympathize with France. The Habsburgs in the 16th century were too formidable not to provoke envy and anxiety.

Charles V’s responsibilities at the time of his becoming emperor were moreover too great for one man to assume, as he himself could acknowledge: they had to be divided. By the Treaty of Brussels (1522) he assigned the Habsburg-Austrian hereditary lands to his brother, the future emperor Ferdinand I . In 1521 Ferdinand had married Anna, daughter of Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia; and Louis II’s untimely death in 1526, after his defeat by the Turks in the Battle of Mohács , prompted Ferdinand to stand as candidate for his succession, to which, despite rivals, he was elected. Power and weakness Open Door policy By a series of abdications toward the end of his life, Charles V transferred his Burgundian, Spanish, and Italian possessions to his son Philip II and his functions as emperor to his brother Ferdinand, who succeeded him formally as such after his death (1558). That division of the dynasty between imperial and Spanish lines was definitive: Ferdinand’s male descendants were Holy Roman emperors until 1740, Philip’s were kings of Spain until 1700.

The imperial line was inevitably concerned to maintain its position in Bohemia and to assert itself against the Turks in divided Hungary, because the loss of the two kingdoms would have meant the reduction of its possessions to what the Habsburgs had had hereditarily before Frederick III’s time (the Austrian duchies and scattered holdings in Swabia and in Alsace)—a reduction that in turn would have compromised its chances of continuing to be elected to the German kingship. Philip II of Spain remained territorially the greatest sovereign in the Western world until his death in 1598; but the Revolt of the Netherlands (see Low Countries, history of ), which he proved unable to subdue, was an irritation that his English and French enemies did their worst to inflame. Cooperation between imperial and Spanish Habsburgs in the 17th century failed to maintain the hegemony that the dynasty had enjoyed in the 16th.

For the imperial line, religious troubles in Germany and in central Europe went on even when the domestic conflict between the insane emperor Rudolf II and his brothers was over (1612); and the Bohemian insurrection of 1618 gave rise to that chain of wars involving the Austrian Habsburgs that, because it was prolonged until 1648, is known conventionally as the Thirty Years’ War . For the Spanish Habsburgs, their truce of 1609 with the Dutch ended in 1621, whereupon the renewed conflict in the Netherlands became merged with the struggles of their Austrian cousins. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) finally abolished Habsburg sovereignty over the northern Netherlands, severely restricted the emperor’s authority over the other German princes, and transferred the Habsburg lands in Alsace to France; however, the ordinance of 1627, whereby the Bohemian crown had been converted into a hereditary one for the Habsburgs, was permitted to stand.

France from the late 1620s had made the most of the Thirty Years’ War to distress the Habsburgs of both lines, and peace with the imperial line did not prevent France from continuing its war against the Spanish until 1659, when by the Peace of the Pyrenees it obtained Gravelines, most of Artois, and part of Hainaut, together with some places south of Luxembourg. The next 30 years saw the end of the Habsburg dynasty’s claim to European hegemony in any real sense. The aggressions of Louis XIV of France, from 1667 onward, took territory after territory from the Spanish Habsburgs—large parts of Flanders, the rest of Artois, and other areas in the Netherlands, as well as the whole Franche Comté and, in 1684, the stronghold of Luxembourg—and demonstrated at the same time that the imperial Habsburgs, preoccupied as they were with the Turkish assault from Hungary, could not effectively defend the German frontier west of the Rhine.

After being saved from the crisis of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, the imperial Habsburgs did indeed obtain one dynastically significant success—the conversion, in 1687, of the Hungarian crown into an hereditary one for themselves—but by that time it was plain to Europe that the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon . In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers, the Dutch and English, led those supporting the Habsburgs against Louis XIV. Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy, there was a further reason for other powers to watch with jealous solicitude over the fate of Spain. The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him, and the question of his succession was one of great concern to the European powers. Up to 1699 it was understood that his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I .

That arrangement was generally acceptable because, by transferring the Spanish inheritance to the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, it would not necessarily upset the balance of power between the imperial Habsburgs and Bourbon France. In 1699, however, when Joseph Ferdinand died, the moribund Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s. Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance; on the other neither Bourbon France nor its British and Dutch enemies wanted to see an imperial Habsburg reunite in one pair of hands most of what the emperor Charles V had had in 1519. Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued.

The Habsburg succession in the 18th century To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I , in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial; but when Joseph I died, leaving only daughters, in 1711, and was succeeded by his brother as emperor ( Charles VI ) and as ruler of the Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian lands, the British and the Dutch lost interest in making him king of Spain and together began serious negotiations with France. Their Treaties of Utrecht (1713), which recognized the Bourbon accession to Spain and to Spanish America, virtually forced the hand of the reluctant Charles, who made peace with France by the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714: out of the whole inheritance of the Spanish Habsburgs, he had finally to content himself with the southern Netherlands and with the former Spanish possessions on the mainland of Italy, together with Mantua (annexed by him in 1708) and Sardinia.

Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy . With characteristic obstinacy, Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720, when an armistice was declared (formal recognition of the Bourbon accession came only in 1725). Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire , and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line.

In order, therefore, to secure the indivisibility of his Habsburg inheritance he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts. The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward (his baby son died in that year).

By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza for the Habsburgs in compensation), he seemed to have won his point: Saxony, Bavaria (grudgingly and with an express reservation), Spain, Russia, Prussia, Hanover-England, and finally France (with a reservation about third-party rights) had all, in one way or another, acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia , which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession . Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy. Great Britain came, late enough, to support Maria Theresa rather out of hostility toward France than out of loyalty to the Pragmatic Sanction.

Page 1 of 2 The Habsburg Lip The Habsburg Lip 1516-1700 - Habsburg Spain Resources THE ROYAL RELATIVES OF EUROPE The Habsburg Lip [Habsburg Jaw / Habsburg Chin] The Habsburg family possesses certain very marked hereditary peculiarities. The hanging Habsburg lip and the long narrow jaws may be traced back through generation after generation as far as the fifteenth century. King Alphonso of Spain curiously resembled his great ancestor, the Emperor Charles the Fifth, who ruled four centuries earlier. Certain traits of character of the Habsburg family were equally persistent, and among these the spirit of acquisitiveness was particularly marked. The Habsburgs were the most successful family of matrimonial and land speculators known to history. While most dynasties rose to eminence by placing themselves at the head of great nations and by conducting successful wars of conquest, the Habsburgs rose from obscurity to the greatest power by acquiring territories in all parts of the world by judicious purchase, by exchange, and especially by profitable marriages.

The long list of irregular affairs of the heart for which the Austrian royal house was noted began with the Archduke Johann, brother of the Emperor Franz I. It was his lot to fall in love with and marry Anna Plochl, daughter of the job master at Aussee, in the province of Salzburg, whom he saw first in 1822, disguised as a boy and acting as postillion for his royal highness. Sixty-four years later another Archduke Johann, nephew of the Emperor Franz Joseph, became enamored of Milly Stubel, a dancer in the Vienna opera-house. The emperor refused permission for the proposed marriage, but the archduke had his way in the end at the price of his rank and Austrian citizenship. They were married in London, in 1890. The saddest tragedy of the 19th Century that befell the house of Hapsburg hadg its origin in a mariage de convenance [Fr: a marriage of convenience, a marriage arranged as a matter of business - among the nobility the mariage de convenance was much more customary than any other sort of alliance].

Crown Prince Rudolf, the emperor's only son, was married in 1881 to Princess Stephanie, daughter of the king of the Belgians. He made no pretense of loving her. At this juncture, Prince Rudolf met the Baroness Marie Vetsera, and lost his heart to her instanter - a love that could not be sanctioned either by the church or by the family. His application to the pope for permission to divorce Stephanie was sternly refused. In January 188l, Crown Prince Rudolph and the Baroness Marie Vetsera committed suicide in an Alpine shooting lodge, under circumstances which will probably never be fully explained. Francis Ferdinand became ï¿½ in line after his father the Archduke Charles Louis, living in complete retirement ï¿½ the next heir to the Habsburg throne. On the disappearance of the Crown Prince, the Archduke Charles Louis, father of Franz Ferdinand and brother of the Emperor Francis Joseph, became the heir to the throne; but Charles Louis was a philosopher, and, appalled by the burden and anxiety of power, he renounced his rights, and died in 1893.

The Emperor was reluctant to recognize Franz Ferdinand as his successor, preferring the latter's younger brother, Otho Francis Joseph, who, however, disappointed the hopes of the aged monarch. He was a spendthrift. He died in 1906, leaving Franz Ferdinand in free and unchallenged possession. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand married Countess Sophie Chotek de Chotkowa et Woguin, the younger daughter of an ancient but somewhat impoverished Bohemian family. The marriage, which took place on 01 July 1900, was preceded by a solemn renunciation of the succession for his future children. No Habsburg heir had ever before married outside the magic ring of royalty as defined by the House Law of the Habsburgs, which would have restricted his choice of a wife to one of the thirty or more Habsburg Archduchesses who were his cousins. There were several great family groups in which the custom of intermarriage was continuously carried on from generation to generation, but which very seldom extended to the families of other groups.

Sometimes, as in the case of the House of Hapsburg and the Royal House of Hohenzollern or Prussia, a direct matrimonial alliance almost never occurs; there had not been a marriage between these two houses within two hundred years. In the south of Europe the Houses of Hapsburg, Savoy, Bavaria, Saxony, and Bourbon seemed to form one combination of these family groups, while in the north the principal combination was made up of the House of Hohenzollern Prussia, Great Britain, Denmark, Russia, and the Saxon Duchies. In a general way, it had long been held to be almost as improper for Kings and Queens to marry their subjects as for angels to marry the daughters of men. A purer and bluer blood ran in their veins than in the veins of their subjects; and to adulterate that blue blood with red blood was to degrade it. They must, therefore, seek their brides and bridegrooms within the magic circle. Kings must marry Queens, and Princes must marry Princesses; and the distinctive exclusiveness of reigning houses must be maintained by a succession of unions between cousins.

Among the Habsburgs it was common custom for first cousins to marry, and even uncles with nieces, so the entire marriage system became most intricate and complex. Almost every one in a family, consisting of several branches, is, through marriage, very closely connected with every other member of the family, and therefore it often becomes difficult to determine just who are the first cousins and who the second cousins, etc. Kings cannot override the laws of Nature even in the countries in which they are permitted to override the laws of the land; that the price which Nature exacts for exclusiveness is degeneracy; that hardly any royal family anywhere has failed to pay that price. With the exception of Charles V the Habsburgs produced no statesmen of great ability, while several members of the family displayed marked traces of insanity. Nevertheless they secured, and for over 350 years they kept, the first place among the potentates of Europe; a dignity in origin and theory elective becoming in practice hereditary in their house.

This position they owe to some extent to the tenacity with which they have clung to the various lands and dignities which have passed into their possession, but they owe it much more to a series of fortunate marriages and opportune deaths. There had been intrigues which ended in tragedy, and morganatic marriages with actresses and other persons deemed "impossible" in imperial circles; and there was at least one elopement of a Habsburg Princess, who, having failed to live harmoniously with a Crown Prince, found that even a professional pianist could not permanently satisfy her craving for romance. The ordinary comment on these proceedings was: "All the Habsburgs are mad, ï¿½ all of them except Francis Joseph; and here is another Habsburg proving himself (or herself) as mad as the others, if not madder." The remark is not profound; but it is often, in a rough way, true. The House of Habsburg furnished the "horrible examples" in two works on the science of Eugenics: L'heredie des Stigmates de Degenerescence, by Dr.

Galippe, and L'Origine du Type familial de la Maison de Habsburg, by Dr. Oswald Rubbrecht. The arguments in both cases are based, not only on a study of history, but also on a collation of portraits; and though the writers differ on some points of detail, their general conclusions are identical. For both of them the Habsburgs were "degenerates"; both of them attribute the degeneracy to the same cause. It was, they agree, the cumulative effect of what is technically called "in-breeding" ï¿½ of a long succession of inter-marriages among comparatively near relatives. No full account of the manifestations of the madness of Spanish Habsburg rulers, Princes, and Princesses can be given here; they are too numerous, and also too gross for general reading. The briefest of summaries must suffice. Joanna the Mad traveled all over Spain with her husband's coffin, wailing and lamenting, at the top of her shrill voice, whenever the funeral procession halted.

Joanna's son, the great Emperor Charles V, lived on the border-line which separates genius from insanity, and was, at any rate, an epileptic, like that Archduke Charles whose campaigns against Napoleon were punctuated by untimely fits. His son, Philip II ï¿½ known to English history as the husband of Bloody Mary ï¿½ is described by the historians as "half-mad"; and Philip's brother Charles was notoriously a homicidal maniac. Philip III was comparatively sane; but even he tried to poison his sister. Philip V was, for years, a bedridden imbecile; and Ferdinand VI was a victim of religious melancholia. Charles II was nicknamed "the bewitched," and was so afraid of the dark that three monks had to sit every night at his bedside, in order that he might sleep in peace. One hears of the physiological law thus violated, whenever the question of a marriage between cousins is mooted. The tendency of such a marriage is to perpetuate and accentuate typical characteristics and weaknesses. A single marriage between cousins may produce no perceptible evil result; and one can cite cases in which it appears to have produced remarkably brilliant results.

But a series of such marriages, continued through generation after generation, invariably and inevitably tells. The family in which such unions are the rule, loses vigor and develops peculiarities ï¿½ a special, readily recognizable, physiognomy, and an unstable mental equilibrium. The transmitted eccentricities ï¿½ more particularly the mental eccentricities ï¿½ may skip a generation or leave an individual exempt; but they are always lurking in the background ï¿½ always to be expected to reappear. One of the well-known hereditary anomalies is the so-called Hapsburg Lip ï¿½ protrusion of lower lip and pronounced protrusion of the chin. In addition to the underhung lower jaw and the large lower lip, the Habsburg physiognomy presents the following characteristic features : excessive length, and, sometimes, excessive size of the nose; 'exorbitism,' more or less pronounced, with a forehead often of considerable height. One would say that the head, squeezed in by lateral pressure, had undergone a concomitant vertical allongation, and had been stretched, and pulled up and down at the same time.

The physical characteristics were long ago recognized by the family itself with pride, and by outsiders with a curious wonder akin to envy and admiration. Napoleon so remarked it at the time of his betrothal to Marie-Louise, as M. Frederic Masson relates: ï¿½ "When" (M. Masson writes) "Lejeune, who had just arrived from Vienna, showed him a sketch of the Archduchess which he had made at the theatre, 'Ah!' he exclaimed in delight, 'I see she has the Austrian lip."' The Hapsburg type predominates in men: in women it is not so noticeable, it appears plainly from an examination of the Hapsburg portraits. This type, from the end of the fourteenth century on, was continued in many members of this dynasty, in the Spanish as well as in the Austrian branch. Several royal persons who played a big role in the world's history show these characteristic symptoms exceptionally distinctly: among these were Maximilian I, Charles V, Philip II, Leopold I; in others they were less pronounced, or entirely missing.

The children of Leopold I (1640-1705), however, broke with tradition, and married into other royal families, which caused a strong decline of these characteristics. When, however, Maria Theresa (1717-1780) married Franz von Lothringen, a descendant of the Habsburgs, again in Leopold II and many of his children the protruding lower lip very pronounced, although Maria Theresa herself did not possess these symptoms, which proves that these facial lines appear in pure type only in the Hapsburg family. The less pronounced appearance of these symptoms in the female sex and the many intermediate forms, make it probable that here is not only with one certain hereditary factor, but also with homogeneous intensity factors; which also makes it plain that it is possible that the protruding lower lip may appear without prognathism, which is the case with several Habsburgs. Of the marriage of Karl von Steiermark, who exhibited both symptoms clearly, with his cousin Maria of Burgundy, who only possessed the characteristic lower lip, four sons were born and several daughters who possessed all degrees of the lip and chin anomaly.

The less pronounced development of these anomalies on the female side of the Habsburgs can be explained, according to several authors, as a somatic disturbance ï¿½ for instance, through the internal secretions of the ovariesï¿½which can go so far that nearly all the external symptoms are missing. Margarethe, the daughter of Charles V, possessed this type only in a very small measure, while her son Alexander, whose father was not related to the Habsburgs, again exhibited a very pronounced Hapsburg type. It is certain that the prognathism appears as a dominant anomaly, and therefore follows mainly the plan of a dominant disease. Charles II [Carlos II], the last Habsburg king of Spain, was mentally, physically, and emotionally defective, and the living embodiment of the Spanish Empireï¿½s decadence, avarice, and irreversible decline. Gonzalo Alvarez, Francisco C.

Ceballos, and Celsa Quinteiro wrote that ï¿½The kings of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (1516ï¿½1700) frequently married close relatives in such a way that uncle-niece, first cousins and other consanguineous unions were prevalent in that dynasty. In the historical literature, it has been suggested that inbreeding was a major cause responsible for the extinction of the dynasty when the king Charles II, physically and mentally disabled, died in 1700 and no children were born from his two marriages... Charles II, the last king of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, presented important physical and mental disabilities suffering from a number of different diseases during his life, hence being known in Spanish history as El Hechizado (ï¿½The Hexedï¿½). ... He was unable to speak until the age of 4, and could not walk until the age of 8. He was short, weak and quite lean and thin. He was described as a person showing very little interest on his surroundings (abulic personality). He first marries at 18 and later at 29, leaving no descendency....

He looked like an old person when he was only 30 years old, suffering from edemas on his feet, legs, abdomen and face. During the last years of his life he barely can stand up, and suffers from hallucinations and convulsive episodes. His health worsens until his premature death when he was 39, after an episode of fever, abdominal pain, hard breathing and coma.ï¿½ It was said that Europe waited for him to die so they could get around to the War of the Spanish Succession. NEWSLETTER Inbreeding & the downfall of the Spanish Hapsburgs – Gene Expression More » The Hapsburgs are one of those royal families who are relatively well known, and in the minds of the public are to a great extent the emblems of the downsides of inbreeding.

To painting to the left is of Charles II , king of Spain, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and an imbecile whose premature death at the age of 39 ushered in a period of dynastic chaos which led to the War of Spanish Succession These conflicts between France and other European powers were one of those turning points in history, a sad capstone to the long reign of the Sun King, Louis the XIV. France’s position as the unchallenged power of Europe ended due to the fiscal and military overextension necessitated by Louis’ war to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson. But this a story of genetics as well as history, because historians have long assumed impressionistically that there was something rotten in the gene pool of the Spanish Hapsburgs. Here is an excerpt from an online biography of Charles II: The Habsburg King Carlos II of Spain was sadly degenerated with an enormous misshapen head. His Habsburg jaw stood so much out that his two rows of teeth could not meet; he was unable to chew. His tongue was so large that he was barely able to speak. His intellect was similarly disabled. His brief life consisted chiefly of a passage from prolonged infancy to premature senility.

Carlos’ family was anxious only to prolong his days and thought little about his education, so that he could barely read or write. He had been fed by wet nurses until the age of 5 or 6 and was not allowed to walk until almost fully grown. Even then, he was unable to walk properly, because his legs would not support him and he fell several times. His body remained that of an invalid child. The nature of his upbringing, the inadequacy of his education, the stiff etiquette of his court, his dependence upon his mother and his superstition helped to create a mentally retarded and hypersensitive monarch. Royal Dynasty : The kings of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (1516-1700) frequently married close relatives in such a way that uncle-niece, first cousins and other consanguineous unions were prevalent in that dynasty. In the historical literature, it has been suggested that inbreeding was a major cause responsible for the extinction of the dynasty when the king Charles II, physically and mentally disabled, died in 1700 and no children were born from his two marriages, but this hypothesis has not been examined from a genetic perspective.

In this article, this hypothesis is checked by computing the inbreeding coefficient (F) of the Spanish Habsburg kings from an extended pedigree up to 16 generations in depth and involving more than 3,000 individuals. The inbreeding coefficient of the Spanish Habsburg kings increased strongly along generations from 0.025 for king Philip I, the founder of the dynasty, to 0.254 for Charles II and several members of the dynasty had inbreeding coefficients higher than 0.20. In addition to inbreeding due to unions between close relatives, ancestral inbreeding from multiple remote ancestors makes a substantial contribution to the inbreeding coefficient of most kings. A statistically significant inbreeding depression for survival to 10 years is detected in the progenies of the Spanish Habsburg kings. The results indicate that inbreeding at the level of first cousin (F = 0.0625) exerted an adverse effect on survival of 17.8%612.3.

It is speculated that the simultaneous occurrence in Charles II (F = 0.254) of two different genetic disorders: combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis, determined by recessive alleles at two unlinked loci, could explain most of the complex clinical profile of this king, including his impotence/infertility which in last instance led to the extinction of the dynasty. F, or the coefficient of inbreeding , is critical here. Charles II was not simply the offspring of a first cousin marriage, he was the culmination of a repeated instances of cousin marriage over several generations. Below is a pedigree of Charles’ descent from Philip and Joanna of Castile (the latter being the daughter of the famed Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon & Castile respectively). I have highlighted those ancestors who enter the lineage from the outside, that is, they are introducing relatively “fresh blood.” As you can see, Charles’ genealogy loops back into itself quite often! Philip & Joanna are Charles’ forebears many times over. This is a problem. To see how, consider if Philip or Joanna carry a deleterious mutation which is recessive in its expression.

Presumably their children would be unaffected, because only one of them should carry a rare deleterious mutation, resulting complementation so that one full functional copy is sufficient. But in Charles’ cases both of his parents are descendants of Philip & Joanna, so the probability that he will inherit the same faulty allele from both parents is heightened. The formula for F, the inbreeding coefficient is: FI = Σ (0.5)i X ( 1 + FA ) What are you doing here is summing up through all of the distinct paths to common ancestors. You weight this by the number of individuals between the common ancestor and the individual whose inbreeding coefficient you are calculating (note that, for example, some of Charles’ lines up ancestry back up to his common ancestors have different numbers of generations). Finally you have to include in the inbreeding coefficient of that common ancestor. Let’s play this out for a brother-sister mating. Assuming that the grandparents, of whom there are only two, are unrelated. So FA = 0.

Then, it simplifies to: FI = (0.5)3 X ( 1 ) + (0.5)3 X ( 1 ) = 0.25 In other words, Charles II was moderately more inbred than the average among the offspring from brother-sister matings! Over time this sort of process would result in radically increased inbreeding coefficients. The chart to the left plots out the process of repeated brother-sister matings within an isolated population over time. The inbreeding coefficient naturally converges upon 1. In some ways inbreeding can be thought of as a way to crank down long term effective population size and increase the power of stochastic processes within a gene pool. If drift becomes powerful enough it can lead the population toward extinction through mutational meltdown . Mutational meltdown can be thought of as a snowball effect, whereby small populations allow for the fixation of deleterious mutants, which reduce fitness, and further drive down the population and increase the probability of the fixation of deleterious mutations. In the case of the Hapsburgs there is no need for de novo mutations, all humans carry within them numerous deleterious alleles which are masked because they only express recessively.

Over the generations of inbreeding these alleles may slowly been unmasked, ending in Charles II. Within the data set from the Spanish Hapsburgs the researchers find strong evidence for inbreeding depression, as defined by reduced fitness of the offspring from population mean fitness: From 1527 to 1661, when Philip II and Charles II were born respectively, the Spanish royal families had 34 children, 10 (29.4%) of them died before 1 year, and 17 (50.0%) of these children died before 10 years…These figures are clearly higher than the mortality rates registered for contemporary Spanish villages which include families belonging to a wide range of social classes and where, for example, infantile mortalities were about 20%. The Spanish Hapsburgs had a higher infant mortality than Spanish commoners. This is extremely suggestive. But the data set here is large enough, just barely, to go a little further. Here is a multiple regression (least squares) which shows the effect of inbreeding coefficient on mortality (take from Table 4): In plain English, the higher the inbreeding coefficient the higher mortality.

None of this is qualitatively surprising, the impressionistic assumption by historians has always been that there was a degeneration of the Spanish Hapsburgs due to inbreeding (see Henry Kamen’s Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 . But it is nice to see it laid out in a precise manner. Not only did the Spanish Hapsburgs have a high infant mortality rate, but it got higher as their inbreeding become more advanced. Correlation is not causation, but correlation is necessary for an inference of causation. The authors finish with some detailed speculations on the specific diseases and genetic abnormalities which Charles II might have been subject to. Since the paper is Open Access, I recommend you just go straight to it.

Rather, I want to point to something interesting: The highest levels of inbreeding in major populations have been found in urban Pondicherry (South India) and among army families in Pakistan where 54.9% and 77.1% of marriages are consanguineous, respectively…In Pondicherry 20.2% of marriages are uncle-niece and 31.3% first cousins, whereas in the Pakistan study 62.5% of marriages are between first cousins. Though in many cultures cousin-marriage is preferred for various reasons, until recently it was extant at lower frequencies than is the case today. Why? Consider that lower infant morality in modern societies, and the large families the norm in many developed societies. This increases the pool of possible mates in many extended families. As you can see above iterated generations of inbreeding tend to result in some serious problems. The Samaritans of Israel are even engaging in a program of marrying out to reduce the high frequency of birth defects. That being said, smaller families sizes in many developed nations in the near future might mean that there is a natural social break on the practice of cousin marriage. Consider if you have a dozen first cousins to choose from vs.

three. That might make a big difference in terms of the probability of exogamy or not. Related: Also see Ed Yong’s post , he focuses a bit more on the specific pathologies of Charles II.

Question: A protuberant lower lip was a general characteristic of which European dynasty?
Answer: HAPSBURGS